White Picket Fences. Tara Taylor Quinn

club in my hands, the slight sting as the club makes contact with the ball. I love the sound of the ball falling into the cup. I’m still pretty damn good at putting.”

      “You could always take up miniature golf,” he offered, throwing her a grin.

      “Yeah, but those fake greens…”

      They drove in silence for a couple of minutes. Disappointment and warnings rang in his head. He’d had a great time tonight. Far better than he’d expected. But that was all. He couldn’t read more into it than a very pleasant evening.

      Zack didn’t do long-term relationships. Not anymore. Short and sweet had become his motto. Long enough for pleasure on both sides. Not long enough for either party to become disenchanted.

      And he sure as hell wasn’t ready to take up with a golfer. Even if she’d been out of the game for ten years. A man could only stand so much.

      “But she’s a woman.” His own words rang silently in his ears as he recalled the pathetic happiness he’d seen in his wife’s eyes.

      He wanted to ask Randi if she knew Barbara, a woman he’d never met. But the words stuck in his throat. Because he didn’t want to know or because he did? He wasn’t sure. He just knew he didn’t want to think about that part of his life. It was over.

      THE FIRST WEEK of school came and went before Randi had a chance to stop long enough to acknowledge it. And she didn’t even have any classes to teach. A couple of regional conference meetings, budget requests from disgruntled coaches and the hiring of new game-management personnel were only a few of the tasks that occupied her time.

      In spite of its small size, Montford, with its dormitories and full scholarships, was a Division One school. In many respects, this was good. From Randi’s perspective, it meant a lot of extra pressure. Pressure to find the best of the best if she was going to direct winning teams and keep her job.

      Having grown up in the world of competitive sports, Randi was not afraid of pressure. She actually thrived on it. But it helped when she could focus one hundred percent of her energies on the task at hand.

      She wasn’t focusing that week. Hadn’t focused since Zack Foster had dropped her off at her door without so much as a peck on the cheek a week and a half earlier. Things had been going so well, too. Right up until the part where she’d mentioned her previous pro status.

      And why should that surprise me?

      Disgruntled, knowing she had to be energetic when she showed her face at the women’s tennis match later that afternoon, Randi gave in to her need for comfort and picked up the phone.

      “Hey, it’s Randi,” she said as soon as she recognized the voice on the other end of the phone.

      “What’s up, woman? Got another revelation for me? Another good tip to help me improve my swing?”

      “No.” Randi grinned. Barbara was slated for the number-one spot on the LPGA tour this year, in spite of all the younger athletes coming up behind her.

      “I was planning to send you flowers or something, to thank you again for all your help a couple of weeks ago, but I know you hate to see them die.”

      “Putting me up at the Phoenician and feeding me for three days wasn’t payment enough?” Randi asked. Barbara was one of the two friends she’d spent time with the week before school started. On the golf course, using her sharp eye and years’ worth of studying every intricate detail of the game, she’d critiqued their performances. And wept with frustration as she watched others do what she could no longer do herself.

      Barbara had been the only one who’d seen her tears on the back nine that last day.

      “The hotel was comped, and you know it,” Barbara said. “And seriously, Ran, I really appreciate your help. You hit that slight weight switch perfectly. I haven’t been able to miss since we straightened that out.”

      Randi fidgeted with a pencil on her desk. “Glad I could help.”

      “So what can I do to return the favor?”

      “Remind me why we care about the things we care about.”

      “This sounds serious.”

      “Have you ever regretted what you gave up to be who you are?” Randi asked before she realized how stupid the question sounded. Barbara was at the top of her career, making more money than Randi had seen in years. Kind of hard to regret.

      “Yeah.”

      Randi dropped the pencil, leaning back in her chair with one foot propped on the desk in front of her. “Yeah?”

      “There are downsides to everything.”

      Of course there were. For every mountain climbed, a valley lay on the other side. Randi knew that, counseled her young athletes with such truths at every banquet she attended, every speech she gave. Without the bad, how could one measure the good? With no losers, there could be no winners.

      But…

      “So what do you regret most?”

      “Same thing you do, I imagine,” Barbara said, her no-nonsense voice tinged with the warmth she reserved only for those she considered real friends. “The circuit, the training, the life of a professional athlete, particularly a female professional athlete, exacts its price. You have to have complete focus, keep your mind and heart on one goal—to be the best. And suddenly you aren’t a kid anymore with your whole life stretching before you.”

      Her fingers straightening the lace on her tennis shoe, Randi froze.

      “You wake up one morning and find yourself all alone in a world of couples,” Barbara continued.

      Or you lie awake one night, alone in a bed big enough for two, on a street lined with houses filled with families. In a town of moms and dads and people pulling together.

      “And you discover,” Randi said slowly, “that not only are you alone, you don’t have the slightest idea how to change that.”

      “Wonder why nobody told us when we were growing up that while we were building one kind of skill, we were missing out on another. All the emotional stuff—the dates, the fumbling first kisses, the hurt feelings. Those were experiences we needed and didn’t get.”

      “They didn’t tell us any of that stuff because winning is everything,” Randi told her friend, the knowledge as natural to her as the air she breathed. Competition was a fact of life, and the point of competing was to win.

      “We just didn’t know, until it was too late, that when we chose to win physically, we were losing something else just as vital,” Barbara murmured.

      “But it’s not necessarily fatal,” Randi said now, barely hiding the question in her statement.

      Barbara had managed, somehow, to win on all counts. She and Randi never spoke of the relationship Barbara had embarked on almost a year before. Randi had never even met the woman, but she knew the relationship was stronger than ever.

      She’d seen the change in her friend. The easy light in her eyes, the peace that had replaced the nervous tension in Barbara’s every movement.

      “It’s damn hard,” Barbara said slowly, “to coax out that emotionally retarded child inside of you. To risk feeling like a fool as you learn things about yourself, about life, that most people learn when they’re teenagers.”

      Randi wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this. And yet, wasn’t it exactly why she’d called her friend? Because she knew Barbara had grown up the same way she had—with one hundred percent dedication to her goals.

      And they were women in a man’s world, to boot. Fighting not only to develop their talents to almost impossible levels, they’d also had to compete with men—for sponsorships, for trainers, for facility time. Even for comps. All the factors essential to a young athlete’s success came so much more readily to men than to women.

      She